Methodology and data set

For this research we’ve used a CSV file provided by a reddit user that manages a private tracker. For obvious reasons, we are not publishing the name of our source, but the entire data set is available on Github for results verification and reproduction.

In order to create these results we’ve used SQL queries, mostly pretty standard stuff: CTEs, GROUP BY, ORDER BY and LEFT JOIN. The data set is organised into three tables:

feb18 – contains spawn info (spawnId, pokeId, spawnTime)

types – contains Pokemon specie typing information

pokemon_types – contains generic Pokemon type descriptions

The spawns were aggregated by the hour (hh portion of DateTime) when they occurred. All times in the database are recorded as local server time.

IMPORTANT NOTE

The data in the data set is not normalized. This means that recorded values per hour depend on number of pings during that period. The provider of the data set did not specify if pings are organic from users or from automated bots. Thanks to j16sdizfor highlighting the problem on GitHub. We are investigating the issue and will update results here as soon as possible.

Results and discoveries

After analyzing and verifying the results, we were able to provide answers to all initial questions, with some rather surprising discoveries, especially in terms of popular

Is there any correlation between particular Pokemon Type spawns and time of day?

Yes, there is! According to our research, Pokemon Types fall into various “spawn patterns” in regards to “time of day”.

Types like DARK and GHOST spawn heavily during the night, starting at 20:00 and continuing to 02:00 (local time)

We found no connection with the in game visual Day/Night cycle

A majority of other types mainly fall into the “normal daily cycle”

“normal daily cycle” lasts from 10:00 to 20:00 (local time) and is similar for a number of types

Types in the third group, mostly featuring ICE and DRAGON, have low sample sizes and don’t seem to follow any observable spawn pattern

We’ve observed two curious phenomena, both which could be due to method of recording the spawns and are still a mystery:

spawn numbers drop off aggressively around 02:00 (local time)

spawn numbers are unusually high from 00:00 to 01:00 (local time)

How does the game use local time and does it use it for spawns?

As data suggests, the game servers use local time to generate spawns.

Niantic’s server side orchestrates the spawns in regards to current local time in the players area. The in-app day and night cycle is cosmetic only and has no correlation to actual world spawns and encounters.

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